The seminar “Decolonizing Communication Studies” engaged students with current debates on artistic ownership, cultural representation, and institutional responsibility.

Students in Prof. Dr. Hanan Badr’s seminar visited Schloss Leopoldskron for an excursion exploring contested cultural heritage. The focus was the Venetian Salon – a historically significant room that has become the center of contemporary debates on colonialism, cultural appropriation, and the perspectives of European elites.

Building on the continuous partnership between the University of Salzburg and Salzburg Global, Faye Hobson, Director of the Culture Program Pillar at Salzburg Global, Iman Albertini and Benjamin Glahn, Deputy CEO and Managing Director, guided the group through the palace and discussed key questions with students: Whose history is being told? How can institutions respond constructively to critique and protest? How can preservation and reinterpretation be reconciled?

The excursion demonstrated how decolonization works in practice as an ongoing negotiation between historical preservation, aesthetic claims, and political responsibility.

Last month, Thawab Hilal, Senior Scientist at the Division of Public Spheres and Inequalities, represented the University of Salzburg in the Erasmus+ Cooperation Seminar for “Austrian and Jordanian Higher Education Institutions” in Vienna, organized by OeAD-GmbH – Agentur für Bildung und Internationalisierung.

The seminar brought together higher education institutions and Erasmus+ experts from both countries to strengthen long-term international cooperation and explore new opportunities for sustainable academic exchange.

As one of the invited experts in the program’s “Thematic Impulses” session, Thawab Hilal contributed to discussions on sustainability, international collaboration, and knowledge exchange in higher education. The interactive workshop format encouraged participants to jointly reflect on future cooperation projects, shared societal challenges, and the role of universities in fostering sustainable development.

Beyond networking, the seminar highlighted the broader impact of international academic partnerships: creating opportunities for student and staff mobility, strengthening intercultural dialogue, supporting collaborative research, and developing long-term institutional cooperation within the Erasmus+ framework.

Eight colleagues from the Communication Studies Department represented KoWi Salzburg at the 76th ICA Conference in Cape Town—delivering award-winning research and emerging scholarship across critical divisions of global communication studies.

The International Communication Association’s annual conference brought together leading scholars from around the world to examine Communication and Inequalities in Context. From June 4–8, the Communication Studies Department sent a substantial delegation: Ricarda Drüeke, Corinna Peil, Nils Förster, Mhairi Louise Rundell, Thawab Hilal, Hanan Badr, Thomas Birkner, and Antonia Bockamp.

A Major Award for Research on Digital Care and Labor

Ricarda Drüeke and Corinna Peil’s paper, “Mediated Care Assemblages: Maintaining Kinship and Work under Digitalization on Family Farms,” earned two prestigious honors: the Top Four Paper Award and the John Garrison Memorial Award for Applied Research from the Interpersonal Communication Division.

The research examines qualitative case studies of family-run agricultural operations, revealing how digital technologies reshape daily work, intergenerational relationships, and the distribution of labor and care responsibilities. Rather than treating digitalization as purely technical innovation, Drüeke and Peil theorize how it demands new forms of communicative care and maintenance work—”mediated care assemblages.” The findings directly address unequally distributed communicative labor emerging under digital transformation, a theme that resonated deeply with the conference’s central focus on communication and inequality.

Emerging Scholarship on Sport and Media

Thomas Birkner brought emerging research to prominence at the International Sport and Media Symposium, where he presented his media analysis framework alongside selected master’s theses by Viola Birkenmaier and Jonas Frey. The panel demonstrated the department’s commitment to developing and showcasing student research on international platforms.

Critical Voices on Progress, Exile, and Activism

Nils Förster, Mhairi Louise Rundell, and Thawab Hilal presented collaborative work at the Philosophy, Theory, and Critique Research Escalator, posing critical questions about the constructive and destructive dimensions of scholarship on inequality.

Hanan Badr contributed extensively across multiple divisions addressing urgent contemporary issues. She moderated a roundtable on exile journalists alongside international scholars including Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova, Celeste González de Bustamante, Carlos Arcila Calderón, Anda Rozukalne, and Summer Harlow. Badr also presented a joint paper with Carola Richter developing a theoretical framework on exile journalism, and collaborated with Alice Beazer on research exploring pro-Palestinian activists in Germany.

Antonia Bockamp presented research on how NGO discourses frame exiled journalism, foregrounding questions of voice, representation, and displacement.

A Department on the Global Stage

This collective presence at ICA 2026 reflects the department’s engagement with pressing questions about technology, labor, care, voice, and social inequality—research that speaks directly to how communication shapes inequality and how communities navigate digital transformation.

An article by Corinna Peil and Ricarda Drüeke on digitalization, family businesses, and communicative care work received an award in Cape Town.

The article “Mediated Care Assemblages: Maintaining Kinship and Work under Digitalization on Family Farms” by Assoz. Prof. Dr. Ricarda Drüeke and AP Prof. Dr. Corinna Peil received two awards at the 2026 annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) in Cape Town: the Top Four Paper Award and the John Garrison Memorial Award for Applied Research from the Interpersonal Communication Division.

This paper is based on qualitative case studies of family-run farms and examines how digital technologies are changing daily work routines, intergenerational relationships, and the distribution and redistribution of responsibilities on farms. The focus is on how families cope with the demands of digital administrative, communication, and information systems and what forms of support and knowledge transfer emerge in the process. Drawing on the concept of “Mediated Care Assemblages,” the authors argue that digitalization not only brings technical innovations but, above all, requires new forms of communicative care and maintenance work.

The award presented at ICA 2026 fits well with the conference theme “Communication and Inequalities in Context,” as the paper highlights the unequal distribution of communicative labor and new responsibilities in the context of digital transformation.

A new study examines how memes obscure misogynistic narratives—and why it’s so difficult to combat them.

Suay Melisa Özkula (Center for ICT&S, University of Salzburg) and Patricia Prieto-Blanco (Lancaster University) introduce the concept of “memetic misogyny” in the academic journal New Media & Society: a form of visual, gender-based violence that often goes unnoticed due to humor, ambiguity, and platform-specific dissemination. Using three case studies—memes about Greta Thunberg, so-called “Karen” memes, and anti-feminist content surrounding the hashtag #SisterIDoBelieveYou—the authors demonstrate how misogynistic messages are encoded through imagery, aesthetics, and context. Crucial to this is the interplay between meme content, platform logic, and the cultural communities in which this content circulates. This interplay generates what the authors call “mythologies of memetic misogyny”: gender-based narratives that portray misogynistic ideas as natural and timeless. The study appears in a special issue of the journal and is available via open access.

Özkula, S. M. & Prieto-Blanco, P. (2026). Just a meme? The role of context in mythologies of memetic misogyny. New Media & Society, 28(4), 1592–1618. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251396942